The Trek

I met her in the Himalayas, trekking up the Everest Valley in Nepal. I was on a National Geo film shoot–video, actually–climbing with the latest excuse for a Summit Expedition: this time an “Everest Environmental Project.” Supposedly, we were there to clean up the bright yellow oxygen containers trashed by hundreds of climbers on their way down from trying to ascend the peak. In truth, we were going up to climb the summit–to photograph and film it–and on the way down we would pay the Sherpas twenty dollars apiece for each empty O2 canister they could carry off the mountain and out of the valley. The Nat Geo angle was simple: it was so entirely rare to actually reach the twenty-nine-thousand-foot summit–through ice storms and crevasses and avalanches and quirky fall-outs–and even though a posse of climbers would try every late spring, more than half would fail. Geo had paid me to film several years in a row for the chance moment of glory when, and if, our climbing team did hit the jackpot.

I saw Anna on the first day. Our crew had been dropped by a series of battered, sixteen-seater, tin-can planes into the tiny, nine-thousand-foot town of Lukla that morning–a hair-raising, nose-dive landing experience between peaks, precipitously dropping the rattling aircrafts onto a five-hundred-foot gravel field (if you could call it that) no wider than two driveways, which pulled up short before a massive pile of rocks. It was a stomach in the throat experience for all of us, even the seasoned Sherpas, and though a handful of us had done it before (some of us many times), we cheered and cursed when the thing safely came to a lurching stop.

Three hours into the trek, I was still trying to get my breathing and stepping rhythm, shifting my pack around on my shoulders, and I was wondering, now at forty-seven, how much longer I could stand to do this work. A month of shooting at Everest, two more in Pakistan climbing and filming K-2, and probably another trip back to Kilimanjaro in the fall. I knew I’d be skinny and wiped out by mid-summer after months of climber’s food (the grainy stew called ‘dahl bat’ cooked at trailside teahouses not nearly enough protein for the physical exertion), I’d have new injuries in my knees and hips and more gray hair, and my marriage would be an even bigger disaster.

I hadn’t seen my wife for four months. We’d been on the outs for at least two years, probably more. She’d gotten sick of me being off someplace shooting for months at a time, started sleeping with someone else, left enough bread crumbs for me to figure it out. We hadn’t ended it, just went on with each other, pretending. I’d already been to Patagonia, Burma, Annapurna, and Kili in the last year and it was only the end of April. When was I going to get a life?

The last argument we’d had about it hadn’t ended well.

“I’m your wife!” Camille had yelled at me, throwing a saucepan lid clattering to the tile floor in our cottage’s kitchen. “You think I like being the one to tell you that you’re tanking our marriage? You can’t be gone seven months of the year and–”

“Shit, Camille! This is what I do!” I sounded self-righteous and I knew it. “How do you think we pay for all this–” I gestured to the house: quaint, lived-in, enveloping. It was perched right on Silver Lake, outside of Wautoma, a lovely Wisconsin setting.

“So it’s about the house? That’s what you care about?”

“Camille. Jesus! What do you want from me?”

She stood very still and stared. Then, quietly: “It’s not the treks, David, and you know it. Are we going to be honest with each other, or not?” She opened her eyes especially wide.

I pressed my lips together–hard–and didn’t speak.

The tension in her eyes dropped away and she said, “That’s what I thought.”

It wasn’t only the travelling that had unraveled our marriage. Neither Camille nor I had known what to do with the distances, so when she started hooking up a couple years back–only when I was gone, I thought, but I didn’t know–I’d started indulging, too. What I called “on-the-road experiences.” I liked to pretend sometimes that it was just me, roaming–a trite and awful euphemism for dismantling a marriage, and not nearly enough of a compelling explanation for why I strayed–but the truth was, it had undone me, her sleeping with someone else, and my own affairs afterward hadn’t helped. I felt like nothing stuck, like closeness rolled off of me–oil and water.

Then, Camille began a serious thing with one of the guys she hired for the camp she ran in the summer months–upstate near Minocqua, so potentially not a threat to our ‘reputation’; a conversation we’d actually had, I’m embarrassed to admit–but then the guy followed her and started shacking up at our place when I left for Patagonia in January. That was a first. It screwed me up. The guy was quite a bit younger than Camille, and it cut me like crazy sometimes–our house, our bed–but when I really spent time thinking about it, my honest reaction was, Good for her. She should have somebody who can be there. Terrible, I know, but there you go.

Eddie Simonson, my oldest friend in our tiny lake town (when I was home, rarer and rarer these days) had said to me a full year before, “You know, the two of you act like you’re divorced, so maybe you should just get one.”

Q

I was huffing that first day, breathing hard, heading up the trail from Lukla. Three hours in, I hit a level space where a stone teahouse popped into view, and I dumped my pack against a large flat rock and leaned against it. The place was a one-room, stone cabin on the side of the trail, with a couple of Nepalese women running it who fed the trekkers.

The easy trek up had taxed me already, not fully recovered from my last gig in South America, or the two before that. My knees were feeling it–sharp little needlings with the weight of my gear on my back–and I had been chewing on my failing marriage for the entire morning trek.

Trekking was what we called the hike up to Base Camp at seventeen thousand feet with our team of volunteers. There’d be seventy of us and it would take us nine days to get there. Once we set up camp we’d prep for the actual snow-and-ice mountain climb, when the team of twelve climbers and Sherpas would head up with cramp-ons and gear and rope lines to try to take the summit, and I’d do my best to film it.

Though trekking was much easier than the snow-and-ice climbing we’d face in a couple of weeks, I still had only a day or two on the hard-packed dirt trails to let my mind wander before I had to dial myself in and concentrate. Once we got to day three and moved above the tree-line, the traverses would become ridiculously steep, cut sharply into the sides of snowy mountains and filled with large stones–an ankle-twisting hazard with every damned step–it was dangerous–and, carrying my heavy pack and gear, I couldn’t let my mind drift. But it was that first day.

I’d been sitting on the ground against my pack for a good twenty minutes, the smell of some kind of stew from the teahouse drifting out from the open doorway, and I was turning things over inside my altitude-altered, headachy brain. What the hell did I want, anyway? If I wanted someone to care for, someone to actually dig-in with me, then why the fuck didn’t I stop this crazy-assed globe-hopping and offer myself to a woman? I knew it was my fault, avoiding and letting things unravel–my own antics and issues–not who I chose or who I slept with. I was tired of myself; disgusted, really. Now, I just wanted to stop. I wanted the stupid, wild ride of my pretending to stop spinning so I could step off.

Camille and I had been friends once–I had loved her–and I thought that was enough seven years before when I married her. But then it wasn’t. I felt like a shit, but I loved my work, too, and it had cost me. She had drifted away, and I had gone searching for something to deaden my loss, to fill the empty places. A kind of excitement I’d gotten hooked on but couldn’t maintain. Did I want something true? I thought I did. How, though?

You are such a friggin’ mess, Traxler, I thought.

Something sharp in my pack poked me and I shifted, then lay back, trying to calm myself. I closed my eyes. Breathe in deeply, hold for one, two, three. It’s was a therapist’s strategy. Relax your chest, breathe out.

One of the teahouse women walked out and nudged my thigh with a steaming bowl of food, and I opened my eyes, grabbed it.

“Hey–thanks,” I said. She nodded and went back inside.

The accepted drill at Everest Valley teahouses–the battered, stone cabins that fed and overnighted trekkers on random stops along the trails going up–was that you ordered some dahl bat, a grainy lentil dish, or a spicy soup with carrots and potatoes, and then sat outside on the stones or the ground, or a table if the place was big enough. Then you waited an interminably long time while the teahouse women prepared the dishes (they made them one at a time.) The women’s faces were a deep brown, like barely creamed coffee, and speckled from the high-altitude sun. They wore weathered climber’s clothes (North Face zip-ups that were gifted or left behind by trekkers and climbers) with handmade red-patterned Nepalese aprons over them, green or red kerchiefs on their heads. Each sported at least one pure gold crown as a front tooth and wore strands of gold chains about the neck. There were never any men running the houses–the women’s husbands were trekking guides, and during the season, they’d be off with some climb or other making their money for the year in a few short months.

My team was sitting on a make-shift stone deck overlooking the gorge, but I sat alone, a few feet away, on the ground. I ate, spooning the dahl bat into my mouth with some vehemence, hungry. The dish was usually spicy, but this was plain, bland, just boiled lentils and onions in broth. Didn’t matter. I finished it, sat back and closed my eyes again.

When I opened them, there she was: Anna. Dressed in a pink, V-neck T-shirt cut off at the waist, tight blue jeans, standard-issue Patagonia brown hiking boots and carrying one of those custom-made packs bulging at the pockets with gear dangling all over it. She had shoulder-length black hair which was falling out of a single band, and she wore no hat.

She walked up–was she trekking alone? She couldn’t be, I thought–and dropped her pack on one of the steps of the teahouse. Two young Sherpas came up behind her, dropping their gear next to hers. They were both dark-skinned with ropey muscles. I scanned the trail, but no one was following.

Alone. Trekking with two Sherpas. Daring. It suddenly thrilled me.

She was medium height–which meant that she was strong, carrying a weighty pack like that–and after dumping it on the ground, she moved her shoulders, stretching them by drawing her hands together behind her back, bending over slightly. As she stood back up I saw a gold navel ring above the line of her jeans.

Her gear was blocking the two steps into the teahouse on one end, and though my climbing team would know exactly what I was up to (there was another door to the tiny place fifteen feet away, wide open), I went and stood before her with my bowl in my hand, pretending I needed her to move so I could get inside. I figured I’d force a few words at least.

Evans–Tuff, we called him, because he could scale anything, the tougher and more precipitous the better–saw me step up and stand in front of Anna and he shook his head in my direction, then gave me a scowl. He’d watched me in action with women before–the last two Everest climbs and two K-2’s, too; and though he didn’t know how bad it had gotten with my wife, he knew I was married and didn’t approve.

Anna’s legs were stretched out on the dirt, her Sherpa guides sitting nearby, and my presence was a bit of silent insistence that she get out of my way.

She leaned forward and looked at the other door on the opposite side of the tiny stone teahouse–ten steps away, literally–and she glared up at me with a look on her face that read, You can’t use the other door? She was annoyed, clearly, and her fire-lit black-brown eyes nailed me to my spot in front of the step.

“Hey–sorry. Just trying to, you know–get in here…” I said sheepishly. I wanted to appear humble.

“You’re kidding, right?” she said, and then she laughed–a resonant and reverberating laugh that sounded almost musical, harmonic. “It couldn’t be that you came over here because you wanted to say hello, could it?” She eyed me. “I mean, Jesus. Be a man about it, will you?” She said it with a bite, but kindly, too, lightly chuckling.

How had she done that? She had scolded me, but it was salty and sweet at the same time, full of delicious bravado. I felt an electrified bit of arousal travel up my inner thighs.

She began to stand, and I helped her up, easing her to her feet with my hand on her upper arm. Firm. Athletic. She was shapely–not thin, but fit and full and womanly. Her scent was musky and sweet from sweating.

Her Sherpas (twenty years old at best, I was guessing) watched with big, open eyes, rapt. I saw a flash of territorialism in one of the young men’s glances up at me: Beware, American. She’s in my charge, it read.

On her feet, she faced me. At five-foot-ten, I’m strong and fit at the beginning of a trek (thinner afterward, when I have to eat six meals a day to gain back my body weight from all of the exertion), and I felt her physical presence instantly in relation to mine–how she would fit in the crook of my arm with her cheek pressed up against my chest, what it would feel like to lie face-to-face and slide my hands down her backside onto the roundness of her ass and pull her body into me.

I dug my nails into my palms to get the images out of my head. I was experienced enough at this to know that I had to slow my impulses way, way down, then woo and draw and play at being casual about whether I wanted her. Truth be told, this was the part I loved: the fire-to-a-match burst of desire kick-started on my skin and flesh; the sweet and pressing anticipation of touching, fondling. The excitement that let me forget. Imagining the steps, one at time, of undressing her before I did; the delicate dance of drawing desire from nowhere, from nothing, into want. I had gotten good at it.

She spoke. “Anna Ocursia. Don’t even ask where that name comes from.” She stuck out her palm and shook my hand strongly, confidently, as if she were on a job interview.

I laughed. “David Traxler. So, Anna, what the hell–where’s your last name come from?” A tiny rebellion.

“I thought I told you not to ask me that.”

“I don’t do everything I’m told to do.” I gazed hard at her.

She let loose a loud laugh. “Well, that’s hardly a surprise.”

“So, your name? Where it’s from?”

“You really want to know?”

“Sure.” I said.

“Latvian. Years ago, of course. Via Spain. Then America. Bastardized somewhere along the way–have no idea what the original was.” She eyed the ground. “Would you like to have a seat in my living room?” She gestured grandly to the dirt, and sat back down on it.

I joined her.

“This is Dawa,” she introduced one of her Sherpas, “and this is Tashi.” Neither man reached out his hand, so she said, “You can shake his hand. He only thinks he bites.”

I guffawed, probably too loudly.

Dawa’s eyes softened and he shook my hand, delicately. Tashi saluted me from his left eyebrow with two fingers, something I was guessing he picked up from a left-handed climber. Both wore beat-up North Face parkas with thick zippers, weathered boots, and brightly colored hand-knit caps.

There was a moment of awkwardness after that. Anna sat silent, looking out over the gorge before us. It was an almost vaporous look–a simple stare–and I wondered if maybe she wasn’t the bright flash of heat and intensity she had first appeared to be. Sometimes, that happened with a woman. You’d move in thinking there was something there–something intelligent, provocative and bold–and instead it would all be show, a momentary effervescence. Like a scent that gets sprayed into the air and then dissipates before you can catch what you had hoped would be a heady and enveloping aroma.

I needed that draw: the challenge of a woman with bravery and spark, a full and heady hit of my drug of choice. A sexual mountain to climb that would, at least momentarily, fill the growing hole of my emotional and geographic wandering.

She stared hard, taking in the landscape. It was not unimpressive. I knew it by heart now; had trekked it eight times up and down–this was my ninth–and I was not blasé about its gifts. Even at just over nine-thousand feet, the scenery was stunning: in the distance, rolling green hills with centuries old deconstructing stone walls mapping out the agricultural boundaries of each ancient farmer’s land, and at close range, gorges of peaks beginning to jut upward, the Dudh Kosi river below us down strikingly steep trails (which the teahouse women climbed each day to carry water back up to their houses, God knows how.) The sky was already whitening, an effect of being at higher altitude, and it would color in more obscure and vivid ways the more we ascended. Within a few miles the trees would thin into a rock-only landscape and everything green would be gone. Scents would sharpen, the icy air like freezing crystals in the nose and lungs.

Possibly her sudden blandness was wonder. I watched her.

“No more green after today. No trees,” I said. “It’s all rock from here on up. A ridiculous rush of up.” I tried to catch her eye.

“It’s a thrill, isn’t it?” she said, softly and almost under her breath. There it was. The spark.

“It is.” I matched her soft tone.

Tuff got up with several members of our team and pointed up the trail. “Hey Traxler,” he said with a grim look on his face. “Time to hit it.”

“Anna, this is Tuff–our crazy-assed climber. The man can scale anything.” I grinned up at him.

Anna smiled. “Hi.”

I spoke quickly. “I’m gonna hang back with Grolsh and Weimer. I’ll catch up with you, Tuff,” I said, ducking my head and dodging his gaze.

Tuff nodded at Anna, heaving his heavy pack on his back. “Yep. Thought so. See ya, Trax.” He headed up the trail, not looking back.

I leaned against the two big rocks behind me and put my hands behind my head, elbows out.

“What was that?” Anna said, watching my face.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just guys being guys.” I started re-lacing my boots, consuming myself with the effort.

She looked over and I caught her scan for my left ring finger. No ring. I had not worn mine for so long that there were no tan lines, no weathered piece of skin where a slice of gold might have worn it band-shaped and smooth. She saw me catch her looking, and she smiled at me, a little wickedly.

I watched her take in a big gulp of air, then she shook her head, laughing lightly at me, as if it had already been decided what would happen between us.

“So I suppose you and I are going up these mountains together, is that it, David Traxler?” Her eyes flickered, and she turned up the corners of her mouth in an impish grin.

She would have me. Her confidence sent a shiver of thrill between my legs and I flushed with it.

Q

We were still on packed-dirt trail and not very high, Anna and I. It was day two of the trek, early, and we were heading up to Namche Bazaar, a tiny cluster of about sixty dwellings and buildings perched on the side of a sharp mountainside at just over eleven-thousand feet. We had a good five hundred feet more to go before we hit the rock-filled paths heading sharply up. The view was already incredible, with dramatic drops down to the Dudh Kosi river and the Everest peaks beginning to jut up in our sightlines.

I had a few young Base Camp volunteers with me helping to carry my gear who were up ahead, and Anna and I were trekking with her two Sherpa guides, Tashi and Dawa. The four of us had gone quiet crossing the third swinging suspension bridge over the river, breathing and stepping.

The bridge, made of thick metal wire and thin planks, was swaying with the movements of our body weight, a sharp two-hundred-foot drop to the rushing water below us. I was enjoying the thrill, feeling the mist from the gushing rapids in the sheer gorge under us, our bodies undulating back and forth precipitously as we stepped. I thought of Wautoma: the lake, the insulated small town I lived in, the stuff I was running from. My marriage falling apart. A sister I loved, Elise, having taken off to a nowhere town in Mexico after her husband died of brain cancer. My mother, dismissive and controlling with my sister, suffocating and cloying with me, off in Boston with her wealthy new husband, refusing to help my sister hang on to her Janesville house.

Away. That’s what I had wanted. To be gone, away from all of it.

On the bridge, Anna came to a full stop on her last handful of steps and looked down through the slats at the gorge below us. It made me flinch.

“Look ahead, not back, Anna!” I called out. It was the simple mantra that had kept me untouched by serious injury for multiple trips.

She cleared the bridge, heading up-trail on the packed dirt, then turned and laughed at me. “David, I’m fine.”

I knew this trail like the back of my hand after eight years of ascending it every spring, so I ought to have been able to come up with some bit of small talk once we got back on the rock paths and over the bridges, but I was watching her instead, and she was letting me watch. I could feel her stand up straighter with my attention, as if she were a flower or a plant that was turning and reaching its leaves and petals toward the sun. She was unapologetic about it, and it excited me.

“Dawa is from Kathmandu–his brother’s going to law school there,” she said. She was breathing out with each step, the way I had taught her to do that morning. “I met him. He and his wife, their baby, Dawa and his ten-year-old brother live together in a five-hundred square foot room, including the kitchen. And you know what? They all seem happy. How is that?”

Dawa turned to her.

“You don’t mind me saying that, do you Dawa?” she said to him kindly. “It’s just that Americans have so much more comparatively, and it’s such a shame that we don’t have what you and your family have.” She turned to me. “It’s palpable, their happiness.”

“So it is,” Dawa said, evenly. His face was a dark almond-brown; his eyes calm as a saint’s. He was not tall, probably five-foot-six tops, but his lean and long-muscled limbs made him appear so. “But we want big houses, too.”

He smiled at Anna, and she burst out laughing.

“Of course you do! I didn’t mean to be condescending. Forgive me.” She spoke to him with respect, even reverence.

“Nothing to forgive,” Dawa replied, again with exquisite evenness. “Happiness is a gift of the heart-gods. Nothing to do with houses.”

Anna chuckled. “You’re, what? Half my age?” She turned and looked me in the eyes. “If we could bottle that kind of wisdom for our twenty-year olds–“

“Twenty-two,” Dawa interrupted, shifting the pack on his back. “Tashi is twenty. We are cousins,” he said seriously, pushing upward on the trail.

“Yes. Well. You’re both astounding, in my opinion,” Anna said, breathing out as she stepped.

Tashi saluted me with two fingers again–he had been the one to shoot me the warning look when I approached Anna–and in his not-as-proficient English said, “Look like you man married.” He tapped his left ring finger with his right index.

Anna laughed and looked from Tashi to me. “Wow! No screwing around, David Traxler. Are you?”

“No,” I lied. “I’m divorced.”

The lie hurt, like an esophagus-sized stone being dropped down my throat into my stomach, pressing at my insides.

For God’s sake, I thought, are you that desperate? But I didn’t correct the falsehood.

Tashi looked me over and I read his face: he didn’t believe me. Or maybe it was my guilt, my own lie twisting my instincts into beguiling knots. I had had my time here in this Nepalese and Tibetan high country–eight years in a row climbing here, yearning and efforting for the summit, and I knew something of these people. I found them intuitive, attuned to stuff Americans weren’t attuned to, calm in spirit and ethical. I did not want to anger Tashi or Dawa before I could get to Anna, nor did I want to spar with Tashi’s protectiveness.

It was a lie of convenience, a lie of need. An empty place I had been trying to fill by means other than anything honorable. But I still believed that I would–soon–find the will to finish my marriage and set myself on a path of something genuine with a woman. How, I didn’t have any idea. But if I was truly honest with myself, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I just wanted her.

Q

By the middle of day two, the trek would get precipitously harder. We would stop and sleep at the end of the day at Namche, at eleven thousand feet, for two days, and for everyone on the trail (except for the Sherpas and some of the regular climbers), the daytime hours getting there would be an exercise in re-learning how to take in air. I had ditched my team that morning before falling in with Tashi and Dawa and Anna, exiting with the excuse that she needed the help.

“She’s got two Sherpas, for God’s sake. She hardly needs you,” Tuff had said to me as I packed up my gear, my back to him. “And you’ve got a job to do.”

I heaved my pack on my back and adjusted it, pulling the clasp of the hip support tight. “Yeah, well, her Sherpas are friggin’ twenty years old, and she’s forty, so she’s gonna need my help. And I’m not supposed to be shooting until Base Camp and you goddamned well know it Tuff, so step aside.” I pulled my trekking hat down low over my forehead, set my sunglasses on the bridge of my nose and stepped in front of him, heading towards Anna.

I wasn’t wrong. Anna would need help pacing; she’d need advice. But that wasn’t Tuff’s point.

He wasn’t the only one who’d tried to stop me or set me straight. At home, in Wautoma, I’d inevitably find myself wasted on a bar stool a few nights after I’d landed back in town after a trek, sitting with my best friend Eddie at Grimm’s Tavern–a little hole of a place that smelled like stale beer and stewing bratwurst. I’d tell him about the last woman I had fallen for and bedded on the trail, the infatuation still high in me, and the yearning, now that she was gone, fresh and body-rending.

“You don’t really want anyone you’re sleeping with, Traxler,” he’d said to me the last time I was home. “You just want the hit.”

“Eddie, you’ve got to get this–she was really something." That was Marina. In Burma, a travel writer. Funny, witty. Good in bed. Six feet tall, tiny and lovely breasts, red-headed, all limbs. That’s what I could remember about her.

“Like the last one? Or the one before that? C’mon man, there’s a word for what you’re becoming.”

“Forlorn,” I said, smiling into my whiskey. If I was asked what color Marina’s eyes were, I wouldn’t have known–that was the truth. And we had only finished the thing months beforehand.

“Addicted was what I was thinking.” Eddie said it soberly, and it landed on me like a short punch to the gut.

“C’mon, Eddie. That’s hardly fair. I just haven’t found the woman who will–”

“You don’t want to find her. You want the chase. And that’s fine when you’re not married–well, hell, it’s not fine even then. You’re forty-fuckin’ what?”

“Forty-seven. What the hell’s that got to do with–”

“Look, you tell them it’s only for the trek–whatever. But it’s not about whether you’re being honest, Traxler. It’s whether or not you’re being selfish. And I think you are.”

He tipped his shot glass, drank, then stood to go. “Trax. Finish your goddamned marriage and get on with it, or you’re gonna be old and alone. And I ain’t gonna be wiping your ninety-year-old ass, you get me?”

He was right. Completely right. My marriage faltering had wounded me and I hadn’t been dealing with it. I’d been filling the empty space, that’s all. But I still needed it–the hit, the elation, the fast pursuit for the feeling of love–the mystical thing that would happen when Anna and I took off our clothes, pressed up against each other, and for a few intent moments, let go of everything except each other’s skin. We would need each other with angst–so I hoped–tormenting ourselves with pleasure, knowing we might literally fall off a cliff or disappear down a crevasse, or simply walk away after making love and never see each other again. That was the hit. The heightened potion of in-the-moment need that regular life couldn’t get near.

I had hiked quickly to the edge of the trail outside Anna’s teahouse where she and her Sherpas were waiting for me. She had her hands on a set of prayer wheels built into the side of the trail, spinning them. Prayer wheels lined the entire trek all the way up to Everest Base Camp–big, gallon-sized cylindrical cans that had been painted with bright, textured Tibetan letters on red and gold and bright blue backgrounds. They were set on metal spikes in a wooden frame at elbow level, meant to bless the trek you were on if you wheeled them with your hands as you passed by. I came up behind her and spun a few myself, smiling.

“Listen,” I said, when she and I stepped over to a rock-perch, swallowing some water before we headed up. “Don’t take the drugs.” Altitude drugs were popular. Every doctor prescribed them, and Anna had them, too.

“Why not?” she said.

Dawa was within earshot and looked up at me, assessing my intentions, I was guessing.

I looked back at him, giving him my most serious stare. I turned to her. “Because the damned stuff is going to make your vision go blurry and your hands and feet feel like they’re being pricked with pins. You’ll also have to pee every half-hour–at least that’s true for some people.”

She looked over at Dawa. “You take them, Dawa?”

“We do not need them. We are acclimatized all the time,” he said.

I laughed, loudly, the icy morning air catching in my nose and throat. “Anna. Dawa and Tashi go up ten or twelve times a year. They could stand on Sagarmatha and sing an aria and never need a puff of oxygen.”

“That is true, David,” Dawa said evenly.

“What’s Sagarmatha?” Anna said, squinting her eyes and looking up at the rock-edge of the cliff we were standing next to.

“Sagarmatha–Everest,” Tashi said, and saluted her with his left fingers.

“I don’t understand–” She was sweet to him. Tender.

“It’s the Nepalese name for the mountain,” I said. “Or, Chomolungma for the Tibetans. They believe that these peaks are kings and queens that they can call on to help them when they’re in need.” I wanted to say, I’m in need. Need for you, Anna. But I kept my eyes trained on Tashi, smiling at him.

“So what am I supposed to do if I don’t take the meds?” She was genuinely concerned.

I pulled my water bottle out of my pack and held it up. “You drink three or four liters of water a day. You look ahead with every step, and you stop every time you feel light-headed and breathe until it passes. You stay off the white-flour carbs as much as you can, and you acclimatize two full days at Namche. That’s what you do.”

I was right, but I had an agenda, too. It would not hurt her to skip the drugs. But more importantly, I wanted her to feel every single sensation when I finally got her into bed. I had long ditched the altitude drugs on the trail for exactly this reason.

She looked at Dawa. “Is he right? I mean–God–he does this for a living. He should know, right?”

“I think you are very healthy,” Dawa said, “and I think he is right.”

She threw her head back and laughed, and I wanted to slide my arms around her and press my body up against her right there, on the trailside. To drown in that laughter, that glorious willingness of hers to just go and be led.

Q

To woo another human being in a day or two–to make her want–seems ridiculous by regular, daylight-hour standards, but trekking is another world. To trek with a woman is to come to know her. I learned, that second day, that Anna lived in New York and she was a technical writer; that her father was a doctor, her mother a violinist who left her dad for another man when Anna was fourteen; that she was an only child. She’d been divorced for five years. But trekking made her say more: what she felt about her mother leaving, how it had wounded her. How her father didn’t recover well. How it had left them both scarred. That her ex- was still her best friend, how she wondered sometimes why she divorced him. The trail tended to do that. The exertion made you talk from your heart, without noticing you were doing it.

I spoke about everything but my wife. I told her about Wautoma, Silver Lake, my best friend Eddie; my sister Elise, her husband Denny wasting away in a Milwaukee apartment, my mother refusing to help. My treks, shooting Everest, Kili, Burma. The upcoming climb on K-2.

We talked through eight full hours of trekking and rest points, all the way up to Namche. We were quiet, too, for long stretches of the trail–walking and breathing, taking in glorious sightlines and inhaling the crisp, thinning air filled with the aromatic scents of another, snowy land–things most trekkers, like Anna, would probably never experience again in a lifetime. It was an intimate act, and I knew how it played out with a woman–the intense exertion and the rare, peak-seeking moments, so gorgeous and passing so quickly, so effervescently–and that, all by itself, could make her want to mark it with desire.

We sexualize what we love, what we’re fascinated by, a lover had once said to me, and it felt true. I had watched it happen with several women: the wonder filling them up; my days-long, hour after hour focus on them kick-starting the want I so needed.

“What do you do–I mean, for a living?” I had asked that morning. I had my water bottle in my hand as we trekked and I passed it to her. Her lips where mine had been.

“I write essays, articles. Engineering stuff, from all over the world. Medicine, new technology, that kind of thing. Three on wind-power this year. That was a trip.”

“Why?”

She downed a bit more of my water and passed me the bottle. “Had to get to Berlin, Sao Paolo, and Britain in one month, then got to see a demo in the desert in North Africa.”

“That sounds…” I pressed my lips to where hers had been on the bottle, tasting her.

“What?” She was sweating, and she unzipped her jacket under her pack’s harness.

“It sounds difficult. Hard. Impressive, actually. Are you difficult, Anna? Impressive?” It was a cheesy joke, but I laughed anyway.

“I’m a rock-climb, baby,” she said, grinning. She flashed her eyes at me. “You sure you want that?”

I glanced her way. “Yep, I do.” I had the instinct to touch her arm, but I didn’t. I wanted to wait.

“Listen,” she said intently. “Let’s not pretend, okay? You and I are going to do what we’re going to do with each other up here in this thinning air, and then we’ll leave each other be. That’s what you want, right?”

It stunned me. “Uh, yeah. I…”

“You’re not looking for more?”

“I guess I want to find someone as much as–I mean, sometime–”

“But that’s not what this is about, is it?” She said it calmly, no edge.

“I don’t know–hell. I guess not.”

“Good,” she said. “Then we’ll be fine.” She stepped ahead.

Tables turned, Traxler. It shut me up for a while.

We trekked into Namche about three in the afternoon, wandering through the sixty-or-so dwellings and small Nepalese stores, looking for a teahouse to stay in. The town was situated on the side of a terraced and steep mountain up from the Dudh Kosi. The first time I stood in Namche, I could see all the way across the lower Everest Valley below, the sightlines sweeping over a vast landscape down–green-green fields cut out among centuries-old rock fences, rolling hills set against the ridges of mountainsides, then thinning out to mountain rock as the elevation rose into the town. It was, even after all of my treks, like viewing evolution itself–like seeing the gods of geography at work, as if creation was being formed before my eyes. That first time, I had sat on a rock for four hours watching the light change across the landscape.

Anna paused with me on a rock jetty, staring out. There was a pale pink band of sky behind the peaks framing them in a horizontal bank of mist, then a distinct line of light blue fading into white as we looked up, the mountains a purplish brown in the foreground and the green-green below us.

“Jesus. It’s fucking gorgeous,” she said.

“It is,” I said, reaching for her hand. It was the first time I had touched her intimately.

We dumped our gear at a funky teahouse lodge (the place smelled of boiling potatoes), larger than most and made of wood and stone, cut in on three levels of the hillside with a string of tiny rooms on each floor. We both went off with a teahouse woman to find a room. I got my own, just in case Anna changed her mind. Then I walked her to the small hillside bakery in the town.

Off a bite-full of coarse pastry, I said it: “I’d like to spend the night with you.”

She threw her head back and laughed, that warm laugh of hers, full of delight. There was a rough-hewn cup of grainy-smelling herbal tea in front of her.

“I thought that was already decided.” She drew my hand near her face and licked the spice-and-sugar pastry filling off my fingers, taking my skin into her mouth, watching my eyes.

The sensation prickled up fast and sweetly along my inner thighs. “I thought I should at least ask,” I said, a bit sheepishly.

She didn’t answer me for a long time, just dipped her head down toward her tea cup, sipping, her loose black hair falling forward. I suddenly panicked, afraid she was going to say no, absolutely not; or worse, tell me I was an asshole for assuming, that she’d changed her mind. But she didn’t. She took both of my hands in hers, leaned in to kiss my neck, and whispered to me, “What’s it like at eleven-thousand feet? Is it a rush?”

We had dinner in our teahouse with twenty or so people from that day’s trail elevation, all gathered in a wood-planked room on the top floor of the place. It was a slow, drawn-out, gregarious event with gamey aromas filling the room from chili-pepper spiced potatoes and seared meat. We shared a yak steak, the best protein we’d get for days. Sitting near each other, a bit apart from the group, playing cards–no reception for devices, just being still and focusing on each other–created a calm; a closeness. The black cast-iron stove was burning yak dung for heat, giving off a burnt grassy smell, and the snow on the mountains outside the steamy windows was a lavender color in the waning light.

We waited until it was late, until everyone in our lodge was settled. Then she led me to her room, in a corner of the teahouse down a dim hallway under the kitchen, far away from everyone else.

“You chose this room?” I said.

She smiled a sultry smile and pressed me through the doorway.

I couldn’t get my clothes off fast enough.

She let me watch as she took her time, baring down to a bra and sky-blue panties. I lay down on the wooden cot built into the wall and tried to beckon her into the open sleeping bag. It was freezing, and bits of snowy air whipped through the wood-slatted walls patched into the stone. She shivered, but still waited. There was only a candle for light, stuck into a half-cut-out tin can lined with tin foil which reflected wobbly lines onto the bare stone walls and across her body. I shivered on the hard bed bunk and gazed at her. Her eyes flickered and she pulled her hair loose. Her breasts were not large but they were lovely, draping beautifully and exquisitely round. She had rounds of softness at her inner thighs; her legs were fit and fleshy.

“Come to bed,” I breathed, reaching for the rough Nepalese blanket piled at the end of the bunk. “I want you.”

She moved to me and lowered her body on top of mine, and as our skin met, she said, “David…let me feel you…” I drew her whole form in against my chest, my thighs, my arousal. She smelled of sweet, dried sweat, something aromatic in her hair.

When she slipped me inside of her, we stayed still, pressing against each other, not moving, her sitting astride and me holding her by the hips. Our eyes locked together in the wavering light from the candle. It was courageous, staring like that–most women closed their eyes or looked away–and it sent a sensation into my arousal that felt, in a split-second, riveting. Then she lay her upper body against my chest, still straddling me. I felt something in her drop away–the bravado gone, softened. She was with me.

I had thought she would be immediately athletic in bed, eager and physical, but this was more: a yielding, as if she had agreed with herself to trust me, if only for the moment. She spoke in a deep whisper, lightly running the tips of her fingertips along my side waist and along the edges of my armpits. “You’re a good thing, David. You’re perfect now, no matter what…”

Her head tilted back, and she closed her eyes as her breathing quickened. Slowly and deliberately, then more fiercely, she rocked herself on me, each rhythm changing and shifting like waves disappearing into each other on a shore, breaking from different angles–rhythmically rising, then tender, then escalating.

I kissed her, and there was no emptiness in it, no sexual urge without feeling or vigorous attempt at feigning passion. She was not holding back, and it moved me. I turned her over, slowly pressed against her face to face, stroking her slowly and pulling back enough to tease. I wanted, in that moment, for her to need me. Where had that come from? No press for her quick pleasure followed by my own intense release–none of that. I wanted her to need. I wanted it now, and I wanted it for afterwards.

Why now, with Anna?

When she climaxed she was loud and uninhibited, and though by then I couldn’t have cared less who heard us, I was thankful she had chosen this room deep in the basement corner of the lodge. She turned me over on my belly then, surprising me–not done with me–and pressed her still-aroused self against the small of my back and began to rock again, the wet of her slipping across my skin in the fleshy curve below my lower spine, her breath heightening. I had never had a woman do this to me–pulse against my neutral body parts for her own pleasure–and the passivity of the pose thrilled me, being taken, the want in her climbing with heat between her legs all over again.

I was moved by sex, I knew it. Electric and uninhibited sex, certainly, and this was that. It was what I angled for first, my barometer of what was possible, as if it could kick-start by itself what I’d been missing and unable to sustain: closeness, devotion, intimacy. Maybe it was just the weariness of my unravelling life choices catching up with me, but without warning, in the middle of making love to her, I wanted a woman who would care about me. Who I could stay with. Her.

Afterwards, as her breathing calmed, she kissed my back, the sides of my face. I turned and held her. The light from the tin-can candle was dwindling.

“Listen, Anna…”

“Yes?”

I spoke into her hair. “After this? I mean, can we–”

She ran the fingers of her left hand down the mid-line of my belly hair. “David, let’s just…”

“It’s too soon, I know. Way too soon. We hardly know each other…”

“You’re right.”

In my head I calculated the hours we’d talked the past few days, how long it would have taken to get to know her like that on regular dates. I felt emboldened. “But I’ll come to New York. I will…”

She breathed out hard. “Oh, can we not–”

“No, Anna. I mean it,” I said intensely. “Can’t we try?”

She lifted herself up on her elbow and looked into my eyes. “It’s just for now–that’s what you said,” she intoned gently, “You and I will go back to our–”

“No! I can’t let you leave. That’s ridiculous.” I pulled her tight to my stomach. Tears stung my nostrils. What the hell was I saying?

“You’re serious?” She lifted her head and took me in.

“Anna, please,” I said, yearning in my voice. It shocked me.

“David, we’re both moving targets. We’re both gone half the year–”

“Look ahead, not back, Anna.” I intertwined my hand with hers. “I don’t want to be a moving target anymore. I want you.”

She started to speak, but I stopped her, reaching for the sides of her face and closing my mouth over hers, kissing her. Refusal was not an option. I would have her. I had to. I kept her up until five in the morning; it was light before she made me let her sleep.

Q

The next morning I was high and giddy from no sleep, still smelling Anna on my hands and my unshaven face. Tuff caught me out on the packed dirt street and gripped me by the arm.

“What the hell?” I said, shaking him off.

“Traxler, it’s none of my goddamned business, but I’ve watched you do this too many times, and I swear to God if you haven’t told her that you’re married, I’m going to.”

I pulled my lips into a thin smile, calmly. “She knows, okay? It’s her choice.” Another lie.

“Fucking fine, then,” he said, grimacing. “You’re a goddamned hazard, you know that? I hope you fall face-first for her and she dumps you on your cheating ass.” He stormed away from me, down the dirt and snow-packed street. It rattled me. But I hoped against hope that he wasn’t right, that beyond my dwindling ability to partner, I might find something with Anna that I’d be willing to fight for.

Anna had gone off with Tashi on an acclimatizing hike–a big one, up to the Thami Monastery, a red, gold and orange temple perched on the side of a snowy peak. It had rows of vibrant-hued prayer tapestries inside called Thangkas hanging from the rafters, and wooden chests along the walls with tiny half-opened drawers overflowing with scrolled prayers. I’d done the trek at least six times, and I knew they wouldn’t be back for eight or nine hours. How she would pull off the exertion after being up all night with me, I didn’t know. My plan was to sleep, then go up a much milder trail and come back. Each of us had to go up in elevation that day, as well as the next, at least a thousand feet, then come back down and sleep at Namche to let our brains and lungs adjust for the higher altitudes coming up. There was always some idiot–usually a guy–who thought himself invincible and went up without the up-and-down altitude adjustment. The previous year, a nineteen year old track star went up without acclimatizing, and the kid died in his sleep at sixteen thousand feet. Acclimatizing was serious business.

Anna was wiped out when she got back at the end of the day, but I tried to get her to take a walk with me anyway. The sun had already dipped behind the peaks.

“Anna–come on! Take a walk with me around the town.”

“A walk?” she said incredulously. “David–babe–I barely made it back here.”

That word, babe sent a shiver of shock into me, fear shooting through my heart at what I had to tell her.

She crawled into bed immediately. I let her sleep for a while, then went up to the kitchen and got a bowl of dahl bat and some tea for her and brought it downstairs. I woke her with my kiss, and she got up slowly and pressed her body up against me. I pulled back.

“Oh…” she said, taunting me. “Had all you can take last night, huh…?” Her voice was throaty and soft.

“Anna…I have to–”

She pressed me. “No, David. You promised…” She slipped cold fingers under my layers of sweaters, smiling.

I took her by the shoulders. “I have to tell you something!” I said, almost yelling. The room went instantly icy with my seriousness.

She sat back and looked at me hard: a dead-on, take-no-prisoners stare. “What?”

I choked up, straining to get the words out. My eyes began to burn. “I–I…”

She looked into my face, and her voice went thin and small. “You’re married, aren’t you?”

My heart sank, and I looked at her imploringly. The air in my lungs felt hot, burning, though it was freezing in the room. I didn’t speak.

“Are you?” She opened her eyes wide.

“Yes.” I dropped my head. “I should’ve told you…I’m sorr–”

“David, don’t.”

“Anna, I should have–I mean, before we–”

She was irritated. “Look, I guessed, alright?”

“You guessed?”

“It was the way you flinched when Tashi asked you on the trail. And the fact that you never brought up a woman’s name in two days of trekking together .”

“But you slept with me anyway.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to know.” She looked straight at me, unapologetic.

“My wife and I–Camille–we’ve barely seen each other for the last two years. It’s my fault. Now she’s got some guy–in our house–that she hired for this camp she runs–”

“Stop, David. I really don’t need to know the details. It’s fine.”

“I’m going to ask her for a divorce.”

Anna laughed, a small eruption of it.

“That sounded pathetic, didn’t it?” I said, meeting her eyes. “It’s just that–I don’t know. I felt something with you that–”

“Look, David…” She trailed off.

“I’m sorry, Anna. Truly.” I was sincere. “I thought that…” I stopped myself. “Yeah, honestly, I don’t know what I thought.”

She stared at me for a long time, and then breathed out lightly. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. Everybody I know is in some sort of relationship limbo. I don’t think I have a friend in the world who has anything traditional. I’ve been divorced from my ex- for five years and we still sleep together when we’re single. Who am I to judge?”

I put my head in my hands. “I just can’t seem to make anything match what’s up here.” I nodded toward the mountains. “That sounds lame, I suppose.”

“The thrill of never seeing a woman again…how telling, David.” She said it with a bite.

“It’s more than that...” I looked down at my hands. I was wringing them.

“Really. How so?” She wasn’t pleased.

I couldn’t answer.

She took in a sharp breath, drawing her legs into her chest, then pressed her back against the wall of the bunk. “God. I’m so stupid. You weren’t looking for a good romp.” A sarcastic edge entered her voice. “You want a woman who’s compelling enough to make you leap. If she’s enough then maybe you’ll want her after the trek? Then you’ll leave your wife? That’s it, right?”

I flared a bit. “And what about you? You suspect I’m married and you slept with me anyway?”

“Hey, I didn’t lie! I’m single. You told me you’re divorced–”

We both went quiet.

“So, Anna…are we just selfish people?” I said with a dour tone.

She made a guttural sound in her throat. “This is what it is to use people for fun, wouldn’t you say? Amazing in the moment, regretful in the denouement. That is, if we have any conscience at all.”

“I don’t regret a single second, Anna,” I said breathily. Then, off her surprised look, “I don’t. There was something there–in that bed, and trekking with you–”

Her eyes flashed at me. “So you want me to hope? With a man who, I’m guessing, hasn’t been true for–what–how many years?” She threw her head back with the emphasis and accidentally banged it on the wood plank fitted into the stone wall behind her. The board rattled.

“Damn it!” she said, rubbing her head.

I did want her to hope. That’s all I wanted. “Please, Anna. I’m going to call Camille and end it. I will.”

“What, from up here on your climbing team’s satellite phone? That’ll be a pleasant experience for her. Jesus, David.”

Little tears formed at the corner of her eyes and she stood up, sliding off the bunk, and I watched her set her jaw, steeling herself. Then she gathered up my clothes and pushed me out into the hallway with them, closing the wood-plank door and locking it without a word.

Q

My team was set to leave from Namche at seven the next morning. I hadn’t slept, and the strong tea I was swallowing in the teahouse’s kitchen was burning my stomach lining. The milk in it smelled sour, but I drank it anyway. I wouldn’t run into Anna again for days–or ever, if she changed her mind about climbing Kala Patthar, her last and highest-point destination above Base Camp, or if she took another trail with her Sherpas to avoid seeing me again. I banged on her door before I left.

“Anna, please! Let me in for a minute!”

She didn’t respond. I knocked for a long time, bruising my knuckles on the hard wood planks, saying her name over and over again, until finally, I stopped and stood there outside her door, listening to her move around her room.

I said, loudly enough for her to hear, “I’ll see you at the bottom of Kala Patthar. I’ll wait for you.” My gut twisted, but I left.

I had blown it. And it wasn’t like I could just call her on a cell phone and say, “Hey, where are you now?” There was no reception, save for our team’s generator-powered uplink, and that was spotty at best and only accessible to the team once a week. I couldn’t call my sister Elise, she’d dumped her phone when she took off for Mexico, and Eddie, back in Wautoma, would hardly sympathize.

If our team was lucky, once we got to Base Camp–and so often a climbing team was not lucky–the weather would stay clear during daylight hours for at least three days, and we’d get a go-ahead to go up-summit from the satellite service via our funky generator-powered communication set-up. If they couldn’t get through to us, which often happened, we’d have to make the decision ourselves, taking the risk. After eight years of trying to summit, I knew that the weather systems on Sagarmatha, on Everest, were so varied and volatile that you could watch them push up through the Valley and descend from the sky, dumping storms or rain or wind or freezing sleet in a matter of minutes, from out of nowhere. The avalanches were even more unpredictable.

Anna and her two Sherpas were splitting off from our route, going up another peak called Gokyo Ri at seventeen-five. For days she’d be trekking treacherous, thin trails cut into the precipice side of mountains filled with sharp and slippery stones, then attempting to sleep at sixteen-thousand feet, which was ridiculously difficult. I worried for her.

If they made it, they’d come down a bit in altitude, then trek back up the Everest Valley trail to a little group of teahouses above Base Camp. Then they’d go up Kala Patthar at nineteen thousand–a hand-to-foot, vaporous-air climb up a mountain that looked like God had dumped a sky-full of gigantic rocks on it. From its peak, Kala Patthar looked directly into the side of Everest, with a clear drop off its backside precipice to the valley two thousand feet below. It was stunning.

It was a crapshoot what day, or whether or not, they’d arrive at the little village near Base Camp, and a crapshoot whether I’d still be there. It was anyone’s guess–the weather, the satellite guys, the climbing team, the Sherpas, her.

Q

Days later, exhausted from six more days of trekking in to Base Camp and acclimatizing, I finally got my five minutes on the satellite phone. I called Camille. I knew I should wait until I got off the mountain, but I couldn’t. I wanted to tell Anna the next time I saw her–if I saw her–that I had ended my marriage, that I was serious.

“Camille, I have to tell you something!” I shouted into the receiver. The connection was shit, and though I knew the handful of my mates milling outside the tent would hear me, I didn’t care. “I’ve only got a couple of minutes on this damned thing…”

“David–” She came across with a static-y echo.

“I want a divorce, Camille.” I said it as levelly as I could.

“You what? I can’t hear you!”

“A divorce!” I yelled. I heard the talking outside the tent stop dead.

“What, now? Right now? In the middle of your–”

“It’s just–yes! I want it out in the open, Camille! Enough already with us having separate lives!”

“You met someone, on the mountain, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“What? I didn’t hear you.”

“Yes!” I shouted.

The line went dead.

Q

The summit never happened. Two ice storms in a row, a freezing gale nearly blowing us off our twenty-one-thousand foot camp. Then again, at twenty-six thousand at the Lhotse Wall, the same thing. After five days up there, we turned back. Tuff sprained his ankle badly nearly falling off a rope line–the thing was swollen all to hell and it took two of us to get him down the mountain to camp.

“Good of you, Traxler,” he said when we finally got him settled in the medic’s tent.

“Hey, you’d do the same for me, right?” I said.

Tuff nodded, though I wasn’t so sure.

I was waiting for Anna the afternoon she came down from Kala Patthar. I had paid six Nepalese kids ten dollars apiece to run into Camp and tell me if they saw anyone matching Anna’s description. That morning, three of them showed up to say they saw her and two Sherpas heading up Kala. Kala was a hard climb–hand to foot all the way up and down over gargantuan rocks with thinner and thinner air each handful of ascending feet. It was slow going. I spotted her about two hundred feet up with my trekking binoculars, and I watched her descend for a good half-hour. She was climbing down over the last of the moon-scape rock piles, about to jump off into the hard-pack, when she finally saw me.

She laughed out loud.

“How was it?” I said, breaking the ice.

“You know!” Her eyes were flashing and she breathed her words out hard. “Fucking amazing! Everest. That other peak, Ama Dablum. The view–God! Even an avalanche across the valley when we were on top!”

She jumped from the rocks onto the flat trekking path and hugged me. She played at slapping me on the face, and then, catching her breath said, “Okay, David. I said no, and you’re still here. Are you going to follow me all the way back to New York?”

“If I have to,” I said, pulling my sunglasses off my face. “I told Camille,” I spit out. “I’m getting a divorce. Anna–it’s done.” I had to be direct. Our climbing team was heading down-mountain very early the next morning and I had gear to pack.

“What? You two decided that how? Over email?” Her tone was accusing.

I spoke quickly. “Look, I think you and I can–I at least want to try. She and I have been...”

“How did you tell her?”

“The satellite phone.”

She shook her head, looking down at her boots, now coated with dirt and trail dust, white scalloped lines streaking across them from where the snow had wet them, then dried. She shuffled one boot against another, tilting her head to look at my face.

“I don’t know what to tell you, David. I don’t think–”

“We can,” I said. “Look, we’ve all stayed longer than we should have in relationships that were tanking…I mean, haven’t you?”

Tashi and Dawa came down behind her, and Tashi’s open face shifted into a scowl.

“You lie, David Traxler. Not good.”

My throat closed up. “You told them?” I said to Anna.

“I did,” she said, blank-faced.

I pulled her to me and held her, and she didn’t resist. “I have to go. We’re heading out tomorrow morning. I’ll be shooting on K-2 for two months–it’ll depend on the weather. But I’m coming back. Wait for me. Please.”

Q

The day we got back from K-2 I called Anna on her on cell. We had gotten up on the top of the mountain on the Pakistani side–no little deal since the stats are pretty grim: one in four climbers dies making the attempt. We were two weeks late getting out, stuck up above a flooded and raucous river with all of our gear and no satellite reception. I was still giddy from the triumph when I finally spoke to her.

“Anna, we did it! It was fucking incredible!” I shouted into the phone. “I’m coming to New York to see you–”

“No, David, don’t–I’m in Portugal. I’ve got a week before an assignment in Spain.”

“You’re in Lisbon?”

“No, the Azores. I found this old hotel here. All stone, the Pousada something or other…”

“Which one?” I was instantly anxious.

“David, I’m leaving in two days. I rented a sailboat for a week.”

“No. Which island?”

“Faial.”

I sighed. “So you’re in Horta then.” I knew my geography. Horta was where you stayed on Faial. “I’d offer to come with you, but I know you like to travel alone.”

She didn’t speak.

“You’re still blaming me?” I said, huffing a bit.

“Not at all,” she replied evenly. “It’s just what happened.”

Her coolness cut me, ripped a hole in my insides as if someone had walked up and pierced me with my own trekking knife and pulled it downward to make a ragged gash. I wanted her to touch me again–to feel the sensations I’d been living with in my imagination for weeks trekking down from Everest, and for two solid months climbing K-2, day in and day out, imagining her on top of me, breathless. But I wanted more than that, too: to hear her laugh, to hold her, to have her need me. To talk to her. Something had flipped in my insides–the casual ability I’d cultivated with other women to bed-and-leave without consequence was now burning inside me in places I didn’t know could ache. Anna.

A few hours later, I paid nineteen hundred dollars for a ticket to the Azores, arriving unannounced at her hotel door cradling an armful of flowers. She stepped back against the carved wooden door of her room, staring at me. When she laughed, my knees turned to soft glue.

“Oh, God, David. What’re you doing here?”

“I’m…I don’t know–” I said honestly, pushing the flowers into her hands. They were lilies, and two or three of them had browned and wilted a bit. “Here. For you,” I said with too much emphasis.

She shook her head, then hugged me, mashing the flowers between us. “What the hell. Come in.”

We had dinner in her room–an old stone space with narrow, floor-to-ceiling French doors with waffling antique glass in them, which opened out onto a view of a rough-hewn barn and the sea golden and pink-skied below it. The salt air scented the entire room.

After dinner she beat me at Scrabble, making a complex word from the four letters of “site” on the board.

“ ‘Exquisite.’ I’m spelling that right, aren’t I?” She winked at me.

“You are,” I said, sounding ridiculous even to myself.

“Yeah, yeah–don’t think you’re gonna get me to give up beating you with that wooing crap. I’m going to beat your ass at this game and enjoy every second of it.”

She laughed uproariously at the look on my face–defiant, challenging–and I felt the push of my jeans against my flesh again; the instant sensation of need .

Her fingers reached across the table and grasped mine, and she led me to her bed. I had reveled in her presence for so many days–alone, yearning–and from so many imaginary angles other than being inside her, that now I was afraid.

She saw the fear flash in my eyes, and she whispered, “It’s okay, David.” Her simple, kind thought for me aroused me fiercely.

She trained her eyes on mine, boldly and calmly, unabashed, like she had in the Himalayas. It was a powerful opiate, looking at her, touching her, running my fingers along the newly tanned lines from her bathing suit bottoms. I felt like I was finally tired of playing at love, tired of my vaporous wandering. Her stare made me want to be with someone who I could want for years, who could trust me. I laughed at the thought. Trust. Surely not, with me.

“What, David?” she said, smiling. “What’s funny?”

“You’re here, and you want me–”

“I do,” she said, catching the sexual innuendo in the back of her throat.

I had meant it tenderly–a truth I was trying to tell–but she was playing with me.

Afterward, as we lay spent on her bed, she started to sing.

“Please don’t,” I said. “It’ll break my heart.”

She lifted up and looked at me to see if I was kidding, and saw that I wasn’t. Then she fell back into my arms, and lightly stroked my chest with her fingernails.

“Anna, can I come with you on the sailboat?” She was leaving the next day.

She spoke gently. “David. If you come with me you have to know what this is. It isn’t forever.”

Q

I would lose. For two years–more–I had used the trek, the room, or the circumstance to have the woman I wanted, to win, and then I had left. It had been easy. A kind of taking, without consequence; a way to feel love, or some version of it, leaving long before I could get hurt again.

And now Anna had me. On a boat. In the middle of the Portuguese sea. Seven days of sailing and a crash course in learning how to man the schooner (I had been on one a couple of times as a teenager, but I hadn’t known what I was doing), and I had argued my way into a corner with her.

It had started the first day. She had brought nothing with her–bikini, T-shirt, shorts, sweatshirt, toothbrush; all of it stuffed into a slim, string-tied bag slung across her back, checking the rest of her stuff at the hotel. She had laughed at me when I hauled my heavy pack on board.

“What?” I said, off her sarcastic look.

“You’re going to be naked or in your trunks most of this trip, David. Where do you think you’re going to wear all of that stuff?”

It was nothing, but it irked me. Her, light and unaffected; me, needy and baggage-laden.

We’d gone to five islands, from Faial to Pico and Sao George, then Terceira and Graciosa–gorgeous, vividly-hued ocean sunsets and quaint little villages. But the tension had grown between us the closer we came to the end of our week.

“No, David! Tie it like a figure-eight! Back and forth–the way I showed you!” she snapped at me on our last afternoon. I was fumbling on purpose, not paying attention.

“So, let me guess,” I snapped back, snubbing out the joint I had been smoking. I sat beside her, crouched and pulling my cotton shirt over my shoulders, the sun biting into my red-tinged skin. “You won’t stay with me, so you’re going back to your ex-husband, is that it? Or is it some other guy?” I said it with a bite.

We had sailed back in the direction of Faial and were floating about a half-mile offshore, where, in another few hours, we would moor the schooner and my time would be up. I could see the shoreline, the rocky edge of it a craggy blue-black line in the distance.

Anna reached for the joint I had just put out. “I don’t know, David. We talked. That’s all.” She lay face-down on her stomach, pressed against the bright white deck of the sailboat with nothing on but bikini bottoms. Her bright blue and yellow bathing suit top was rolled up in a ball next to her.

“Be fucking honest, Anna. Christ!”

“Honest? You’re kidding, right?” Her head lifted from the deck and she opened her eyes extremely wide.

“So, your ex- will take you back, after everything got fucked up?” I sniffed the air: bitter with salt and blasting hot like an oven.

“Don’t say it like I was unfaithful to him. I wasn’t.” She was up on her elbows now, her bare breasts draping toward the deck.

“You mean, ‘Not like you, David.’ ” I mimicked her and she grimaced.

“You did whatever you did in your marriage. That’s between you and–”

I flared. “Why the hell did you invite me on this goddamned island-hopping trip?”

“I didn’t invite you. You invited yourself.” She relit the joint, inhaled, then blew smoke through her teeth, chuckling lightly.

“Jesus, Anna!” I bellowed. “What the fuck are we doing here?”

She sighed. “I don’t know, David,” she said evenly, watching my face as she spoke. “Having a little fun. That’s what you said, as I recall.”

The boat swayed, and Anna rolled over on her back, baring her fleshy, tanned breasts. She reached with her leg and wrapped her foot around my ankle, smiling at me with a wicked grin.

I felt a quick and prickling press in my trunks–the against-my-will arousal of seeing her bare-breasted–and it irritated me. I forced myself to look out at the waves, which were gaining a little clip with the afternoon wind. She flipped over and slid forward on her stomach, kissing the tops of my sunburned feet.

I winced. “Anna–for God’s sake–” I shook my feet out from under her face. I sounded petulant and I knew it.

She sat up, crossing her legs, nearly naked in front of me. “We’ve got a few more hours, David. Don’t ruin it.”

“Screw it,” I said under my breath, and went below deck.

I mixed myself a drink–canned coconut juice and rum without ice and downed it, then sat down on the schooner’s unmade bed. It had not been made all week, the light blue cotton sheets strewn and tangled at the foot. She would laugh if she saw my cocktail and say, “God, David, you can’t mix a drink to save your life.” I loved that laugh, though it could make me feel small and diminished.

Ten minutes later she dangled her feet into the hatch, her perfect, bright-red toenails shining, then leaned her head in. “Don’t get drunk,” she teased. “I’m going to want you in twenty minutes.”

Too late, I thought. I’d had three by the time she came down, the sugar and alcohol mix already giving me a splitting headache, and she crawled in next to me in the bunk, pressing up against my back.

“Let’s not fight, David, okay?” She stroked my face.

I felt an irritation ignite instantly in my belly. I turned and held her by the shoulders. “Look, I can’t just lose myself in you and then–”

“Shhhhh…” she purred, then slid her fingertips down my bare sides, her hands slithering into my trunks. I pushed back against her and then away, resisting, but she rolled over on top of me and pressed. I can’t, I thought. But two minutes later, she eased my trunks off and I let her do it. She wriggled out of her bathing suit bottoms and I pulled her in and held her tightly. Then she touched me, played with me, pressed, but I rose and fell, going soft. Hands, mouth, pressure–no arousal. Nothing. I writhed, ground against her pelvis–sure-fire for me, every time–but I stayed wilted, drained. It stunned me.

“This never fucking happens to me–” I said, red in the face and furious.

“David, it’s not a big deal. It’s time for us to go, that’s all.” She kissed my cheek, got up off me and headed up the ladder to the deck, leaving me naked on the narrow, foam mattress.

I looked at my flaccid flesh. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

When I stood up in the galley, the schooner took a slam off a huge wake and I bashed my forehead against an open cabinet. My liquor stash. A good-sized bruise would form above my right eyebrow. Perfect, I thought sarcastically.

A minute later, I climbed up on deck where she was standing in her full blue and yellow bathing suit, the yellow ties of her crisscrossed top strung over her strong back. She moved in and held my face, then kissed me.

“Anna, I wanted to say I’m–”

“No, don’t. Really.” She pulled her lightweight string-tied bag over her shoulders, backpack-style, then stepped over the corded railing of the schooner, curling her toes over the edge of the boat.

“What’re you doing?”

She dove then, a clean arc off the side of the sailboat, coming up for air thirty feet away, the blue water parting for her water-slicked, black-haired head.

Her legs and arms pumped as she turned, athletically swimming toward shore.

“Anna!” I yelled. “Where are you going? You can’t leave me on this thing–”

She treaded water and shouted, “You’re going to be fine on your own! You’ll see!”

A sizable wave came up under the sailboat, and I quickly and clumsily grasped on to the boom, but then the boat settled easily over the wave and evened out.

“See, David!” Anna called from the sea, her head bobbing above the waterline. “No crash! You’re going to be just fine!”

“Anna! Jesus! Come on!”

She turned away from the schooner and swam vigorously, farther and farther toward the harbor, ignoring me.

As I looked around at the endlessness of the seawater around me, the port a good half-mile away, I felt it: how alone I was. Unaided, abandoned. A person moored in the middle of the ocean and inept, with the barest of skill in navigating back to a safe shore. It was the entirety of my adult loving laid before me, and it was my own damned fault.

I had thought I was coming half-way around the world to woo her–a kind of Hail-Mary pass or a shot in the dark that she’d want me; that alone in Portugal, she’d come to need me. But I knew, just then, watching her–stroke after stroke as she swam away from me–that she had let me come to say good bye.

She had planned to make me find my way back by myself.

Anna, who I wanted with all my heart, would return to her life, and I would return to my divorce papers in Wisconsin, my empty house. Alone.

I stood on the deck, staring into the blue-green sea, the bright Portuguese sun glittering off the swaying water, knowing I’d be altered by this, by her, and that I would want to be.

The hot air burned my throat, and I breathed it out with force, gazing at her now-distant form.

“So long, Anna,” I whispered, then whispered it again.

I shifted the rudder, my sun-singed face turning into the crisp early-evening wind, and with an unsteady hand, steered for shore. %